Sunday, April 23, 2017

Opening Monday of next week and running until July 30, The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents a major retrospective of the
photographs of Irving Penn. The show marks the centennial of the artist's
birth. Over the course of his nearly 70-year career, Irving Penn
(1917–2009) mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio photography that
is distinguished for its meticulous attention to composition, nuance,
detail, and printmaking. Irving Penn: Centennial,
opening April 24, 2017, will be the most comprehensive exhibition of
the great American photographer's work to date and will include both
masterpieces and hitherto unknown prints from all his major series.

Long celebrated for more than six decades of influential work at Vogue magazine,
Penn was first and foremost a fashion photographer. His early
photographs of couture are masterpieces that established a new standard
for photographic renderings of style at mid-century, and he continued to
record the cycles of fashions year after year in exquisite images
characterized by striking shapes and formal brilliance. His rigorous
modern compositions, minimal backgrounds, and diffused lighting were
innovative and immensely influential. Yet Penn's photographs of fashion
are merely the most salient of his specialties. He was a peerless
portraitist, whose perceptions extended beyond the human face and figure
to take in more complete codes of demeanor, adornment, and artifact. He
was also blessed with an acute graphic intelligence and a sculptor's
sensitivity to volumes in light, talents that served his superb nude
studies and life-long explorations of still life.

There is a stunning 376 page catalogue to support the show: The definitive book on the work of a virtuosic and revered American
photographer Irving Penn (1917-2009) was among the most esteemed and
influential photographers of the 20th century. Over the course of a
nearly seventy-year career, he mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio
photography that is distinguished for its meticulous attention to
composition, nuance, and detail. This indispensable book features one
of the largest selections of Penn's photographs ever compiled, including
famous and beloved images as well as works that have never been
published. Celebrating the centennial of Penn's birth, this lavish
volume spans the entirety of his groundbreaking career.
Avaialble now on bookdepository at 29% off.

Friday, April 21, 2017

Man Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes in his 2015 work Keeping an Eye Open, Essays on Art offers some profound observations on the reading and understanding of art.

I particularly liked the essay - So Does It Become Art? - where Barnes observed: What counts is the surviving object and our living response to it. The tests are simple: does it interest the eye, excite the brain, spur the mind to reflection and move the heart; further, is an apparent level of skill involved? Much current fashionable art bothers only the eye and briefly the brain, but fails to engage the mind and heart. It may, to use the old dichotomy, be beautiful, but it is rarely true to any significant depth... One of the constant pleasures of art is its ability to come at us from an unexpected angle and stop us short in wonder.

Such simple truths, so easy to embrace yet so often left at the door to the studio.

In the New York Times review of Keeping an Eye Open they say: Gustave Flaubert — the subject of Julian Barnes’s magical novel-biography-meditation, “Flaubert’s Parrot”
— argued that great paintings required no words of explanation. But as
Mr. Barnes writes in “Keeping an Eye Open,” an illuminating new
collection of essays on art, “we remain incorrigibly verbal creatures
who love to explain things” — “put us in front of a picture and we
chatter, each in our different way.” You can read the full review HERE.

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

The Fotobookfestival Kassel together with its cooperation partner Verlag Kettler
again has invited all photographers to present their as-yet unpublished
photobooks to an international public and eminent experts. In 2017 the
best 49 books has been shortlisted by a shortlist-jury and will be
exhibited at international photo events, amongst others, in Istanbul,
Moscow, Rome, Madrid, Dublin, Aarhus, Sofia, Zagreb and Lodz. From these
49 titles, 3 winners will be chosen by an international jury at the
ISTANBUL PHOTOBOOK FESTIVAL on 28 April. The winner of the First Prize
will be produced and published by our cooperation partner Verlag Kettler, Germany. Second and Third Prize is a book production voucher given by our partner k-books, who specializes in high-quality book productions in small quantities.

Friday, April 14, 2017

Opening today and running until July 23 this major retrospective examines the work and career of Larry Sultan
(American, 1946–2009) an internationally renowned photographer with
deep ties to the SF Bay Area as both an artist and an educator. Sultan’s
often intensely personal images — many drawn from his own family’s
history — blend documentary and staged elements in their explorations of
storytelling, family, and domesticity.
Larry Sultan: Here and Home explores the artist’s 35-year
career through more than 200 photographs, a billboard created with
conceptual artist and frequent collaborator Mike Mandel, a film, and
Study Hall — a room offering a unique glimpse into Sultan’s exploratory
process. Works on view include Sultan’s early collaborative projects of
the 1970s, made with Mandel, as well as his later work including Pictures from Home (1983–92), The Valley (1997–2003), and Homeland (2006–09).
You can see more on the SF MOMA website HERE.

Larry Sultan, from the series Pictures From Home, 1984

Larry Sultan, from the series Pictures From Home, 1984

Coinciding with the SF MOMA show MACK BOOKS have reissued and updated Larry Sultan's seminal 1992 bookwork Pictures From Home.

MACK says this: What drives me to continue this work is difficult to name. It has
more to do with love than with sociology. With being a subject in the
drama rather than a witness. And in the odd and jumbled process of
working, everything shifts: the boundaries blur, my distance slips, the
arrogance and illusion of immunity falters. I wake up in the middle of
the night, stunned and anguished. These are my parents. From that simple
fact, everything follows.’ – Larry Sultan
First published in 1992 to wide critical acclaim, Pictures From Home
is Larry Sultan’s pendant to his parents. Sultan returned home to
Southern California periodically in the 1980s and the decade-long
sequence moves between registers, combining contemporary photographs
with film stills from home movies, fragments of conversation, Sultan’s
own writings and other memorabilia. The result is a narrative collage in
which the boundary between the documentary and the staged becomes
increasingly ambiguous. Simultaneously the distance usually maintained
between the photographer and his subjects also slips in an exchange of
dialogue and emotion that is unique to this work.
Significantly increasing the page count of the original book, this MACK design of Pictures From Home
clarifies the multiplicity of voices – both textual and pictorial – in
order to afford a fresh perspective of this seminal body of work.
Emphasizing the cinematic motion of the family’s home videos, the
Super-8 film stills have been newly digitized and magnified, with select
scenes running full-bleed across double-page spreads. Meanwhile,
Sultan’s photographs of his parents as they go about their daily lives –
against the quintessential backdrop of the Reagan-era American dream –
are supplemented with previously unpublished images. Most significantly,
the book honours Sultan as the oft-hailed ‘King of Colour Photography’.
You can read more on the MACK BOOKS website HERE.

Friday, April 7, 2017

London's Tate Modern, apart from being one of the most significant public galleries anywhere, produce a series of short YouTube videos that support and amplify their various activities. I was drawn to a recent production - Wolfgang Tillmans – 'What Art Does in Me is Beyond Words'.

Tate says this: We spend the day with artist Wolfgang Tillmans in his Berlin studio as he prepares for his Tate Modern exhibition.German-born,
international in outlook and exhibited around the world, Wolfgang
Tillmans spent many years in the UK and is currently based in Berlin. In
2000, he was the first photographer and first non-British artist to
receive the Turner Prize.Alongside portraiture, landscape and
intimate still lifes, Tillmans pushes the boundaries of the photographic
form in abstract artworks that range from the sculptural to the
immersive.

Running for just over 6 minutes the video is well worth a look. You can do so HERE. And can go to the Tate Modern site HERE.

Saturday, April 1, 2017

It’s the biggest, most prestigious photography festival in the world and
it’s back – Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles opens on 03 July
and closes on 24 September. It’s the 48th edition of the festival,
which has seen seismic changes in the last few years – the departure of
its long-standing director Francois Hebel after the 2014 edition, and
the arrival of his replacement, Sam Stourdze, the backing of the
influential LUMA Foundation, and the Cosmos-Arles book fair. This
history and reputation mean Arles is able to pull in the big names,
which this year means including solo shows by Joel Meyerowitz, Michael
Wolf, Gideon Mendel, Masahisa Fukase, Alex Majoli and Roger Ballen; plus
an exhibition on Surrealism organised by Le Centre Pompidou and
including works by Hans Bellmer, Erwin Wurm and Rene Magritte. Arles
also uses its might to showcase lesser-known names and regions, however,
and one of the themes running through the 2017 edition is Latina!, a
celebration of work from South America in four separate shows.

You can read more from British Journal of Photography HERE. And you can go to ARLES 2017 - Les Rencontre de la Photographie site HERE.

About Me

My pictures explore the strange anthropology of cities. The unusual and overlooked in the human landscape.
I am asking the viewer to question the idea that photographs as documents are complete representations of subject.
I'm interested in the universality of life and the idea of parallel lives - when one thing is happening here, something else is happening over there. The democracy of non-places fascinates me, in the knowledge that inevitably nothing is as it seems.
I work and live between Auckland and Paris.
http://harveybenge.com/
email:harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz